Saturday, December 26, 2009

Beyond Knowledge

Knowledge economics is a discipline of economics, it deals with understanding knowledge as a resource, and in reality, in the material realm deals with knowledge for what it is, the primary resource.

Knowledge being the primary resource, knowledge coming from human beings, (the unknown can never be knowledge), it follows that the creator of the primary resource is a human being, the catalyst and tool for creating knowledge is therefore the human mind. That one see's goods in shops of many varieties is because of human beings and the skills that have been horned over the centuries and millennia. This has been known for a long time by honest philosophers who actually cared about humanity.

The Tao Te Ching was written by Lao Tzu in 400 BC, in it he states that "the more skills the people have, the further novelties multiply". With more skills in the world there are so many goods one can spend their hard earned money on, many varieties of cell phones, cars, televisions, screws, screw drivers, wines, clothes, video games, there are a lot of novelties, all brought about by people having more skills. Lao Tzu knew this around 2 500 years ago, yet today and in the last 400 years there are those who claim they are the custodians of knowledge, those are merely enemies of humanity.

No matter how important knowledge economics is, it is neither the beginning or the end of life, but don't kid yourself it is an important part of life.Knowledge economics does not deal with morality as a discipline and no economics should ever deal with the question of morality. Economics to mature should deal with the phenomenon of what happens if this and that takes place be this or that moral or immoral. Once the question of morality enters one can no longer be objective.

However, if one takes a moral path the economy and the people will prosper. A society that respects and guarantees simple freedoms for the individual, and where individuals know their duties to society, it must be remembered that an individual exists in a society, the society will be generally be weaker if income inequalities are too large, it will lead to social disturbances, one see this for themselves in Africa, Latin America, and many parts of Asia and the Middle East, the rich and poor gap is just too wide.

This of course does not absolve the richer countries who are in many respects are just as immoral and in many instances even worse as they get the resources for their survival from these poor countries where they pay far less for labor for the same mineral, support these regimes for cheap oil, gold, iron, rubber, chrome, the list is endless.

Knowledge is there for everybody’s taking, the principle is so simple, yet people seem or rather choose to be blind to serve their own interests. Again we learn from Lao Tzu, "understanding the ordinary: enlightenment. Not understanding the ordinary: blindness creates evil. Understanding the ordinary: mind opens. Mind opening leads to compassion, compassion to nobility, nobility to heavenliness. "

A better but more difficult translation for the last part of the above quote would read ,"But should one act from knowledge of the constant one's actions will lead to impartiality, impartiality to kingliness, kingliness to heaven." The above translations are of passage 16 of the Tao Te Ching.

What is the ordinary, what is this constant. The ordinary is that we are all just humans, it is a constant in this case that just as an oxygen atom must behave the same in Mali as in China, Russia, USA, or Germany. Therefore a brain is just a brain, be it in Chad, Ecuador, South Korea, or North Korea. That is just the ordinary, we are after all just humans, just understanding the ordinary will bring enlightenment. People however look for complicated things when it is simply understanding the ordinary is what they need.

Not understanding the ordinary leads to blindness that in turn leads to evil. When one thinks simply because they are a certain race that alone guarantees their superiority is blindness that has led them to become the purest evil, because their evil is a result of them refusing to accept the ordinary that we are all just humans. Now has all these evil people spreading lies to say knowledge comes through them only to justify their robbery and theft of the world, of course it is easier if they control the media and other forms of propaganda.

Now understanding the ordinary leads to an open mind. Understanding that we are just human beings will lead to an open mind. Those societies being attacked by those societies that cannot accept will suffer until they accept the ordinary, a simple constant that we are all just human beings, otherwise if Mali continues to listen to French and white Canadian propaganda and refuse the ordinary they will remain poor, the same for Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Yemen, Nepal, Burma, we are all just humans, that is the ordinary, what one human can do another can do it.An open mind will lead to compassion, do not ever expect compassion from one who says they are better than you, you cannot expect compassion from the West if you are an African, whatever they do there is an ulterior motive, they have said they are superior, they cannot open the minds, they cannot have compassion, some individual westerners with open minds might have compassion, but not the society nor the government, the aide has ulterior motives, because if less developed countries accepted the ordinary that they are just humans and can do what other humans can do they would help themselves, but one has massive propaganda about the likes of better minds buy where these better minds from Oxford and Cambridge when the British auto industry disappeared, or the British aerospace industry, people should not be fooled by the hype, but one cannot have an open mind without first accepting the ordinary, and one will definitely not have compassion without an open mind, with a closed mind one believes in a manifest destiny, the same person cannot at the same time have compassion.

So one can see that there is more to knowledge, morals definitely have a place in society, all the knowledge will not save a society that basically has no moral code, all members of a society need to be protected, a society of say Zulu's needs to ensure that all Zulu's are protected the rich and the poor because the rich are protected by the poor who buy their goods and the poor by the rich who ensure they have jobs. If rich Zulu's started giving jobs to others they in turn should not expect the poor to be with them in times of peril and that Zulu society will just crumble. It is just an example.

A moral society firsts and foremost allows its citizens, those under its protection, to exist and find a living to the best of their abilities, this can only be done by reducing government interference. For any serious believer in freedom, it would be worthwhile to read a paper by one Murray N. Rothbard entitled "Concept of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Towards Laissez Faire". It is a good and insightful paper. In the paper Rothbard shows the history of freedom thought on how to make a successful and more happy society, "The first libertarian intellectual was Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism" (Rothbard). Rothbard also makes the following point regarding a successor of Lao Tzu:

"Chuang-tzu reiterated and embellished Lao-tzu's devotion to laissez faire andopposition to state rule: "There has been such a thing as letting mankind alone;there has never been such a thing as governing mankind [with success]." In fact,the world simply "does not need governing; in fact it should not be governed."Chuang-tzu was also the first to work out the idea of "spontaneous order,"developed particularly by Proudhon in the nineteenth and by F. A. Hayek of theAustrian School in the twentieth Century: "Good order results spontaneously whenthings are let alone.""

Note that Rothbard admits that the white humans only understood this concept almost two and a half millennia after the Chinese, Hayek one of the greatest only understood the concept only recently in comparison, but most whites would act as if the idea came from them not an individual from China millennia ago.

Morals and morality go a long way to improving the lot of a people, probably a major foundation in building a society with a strong economy, it is more than just knowledge, it goes way beyond knowledge, but knowledge might not be the foundation but it is a cornerstone.